David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: > > Nancy Thuleen <nthuleen at students.wisc.edu> writes: > > > (Xthread: now see, if I'd had an e-book version of Dragon, I > > wouldn't have had to flip through so many pages -- but on the other > > hand, as someone else pointed out, I knew the scene I was looking > > for was at the top half of a right-hand side page, and I don't know > > if I'd have been able to find that in an e-book. Still, I'm for > > them, in general terms.) I was the someone, and claim you'd be able to do that in a good e-book implementation. > Okay, here's a bit of a teaser. I'm working on putting together a > search engine with access to the full text of the books (I've got 4 > books to work with, and now I'm working on getting the search engine > part going; it'll be quite a bit of work to complete the set of books > when that's ready). This should make it easy to look for things like > that. Yay! > The way existing search engines work isn't ideal for this -- they find > a *document*, and don't go into details on hits within that document. > So I've got htdig working in my test environment, but it's not really > returning useful information yet and I'm pondering how much I can do > by working with templates, and how much trouble it would be to go into > the actual code. I think it assumes a very different model, > unfortunately. Could you make each page in the book a separate document, e.g. Dragon-Ch3-p72? Then returning the document automatically gives you the book, the chapter, and --for at least one edition-- the page number, from which you could also get "20% into the chapter", like you describe below: > But I hope to get something working eventually. It'll probably return > hits mostly in terms of "20% into chapter 7 of _Dragon_" or something; > because one constraint is we don't want it to give away the text of > the books *too* easily. - tky P.S. I'm switching to the digest. All this traffic is neat, but it is a constant flood!